Top 13 tech tools for home workers

As promised, here is Francesca Geens’ write-up of a workshop about tech tools and it’s so comprehensive I’m splitting it into 3 parts for easy reading!

At one of Judy Heminsley’s How to Work from Home workshops at Central we had a tech theme and San Sharma, Community Manager, from Work Snug and Enterprise Nation came along to talk us through his top 10 tech tools to save you time. As a few people couldn’t make it I promised to write it up and as I am in tech myself am going to throw in a few of my favourites at the end as well.

So what were San’s top ten tech tools?

1. Chrome: a good browser is really important. This one is quick, secure, has great add-ons and works across all platforms. Mac user should also check out Safari. Great tip: make sure you are making the most of tabs.

2. Instapaper: Save the shortcut button into your browser and whenever you see some great content you’d like to read later on send it to Instapaper for offline reading on your phone through the Instapaper app. Show You is a similar site for keeping track of video content you’d like to go back to.

3. Google Reader was one of San’s suggestions, but as a reader has kindly pointed out, it’s now been discontinued and Feedly is a good alternative – see comment by Michael Graves below.

4. Delicious: tagging bookmarks and saving them to your Delicious account is another way to save time by making it easy to go back to great content you come across but don’t have time to read or want to keep going back to. The social side of Delicious is not to everyone’s liking (ie you may not want to show the world what your reading) so note that you have the option to keep everything private. Either way you get to make the most of the great tagging facilities to easily find contents. More advanced users will want to check out the Stack feature.

5. Evernote: Another classic app which is available across platforms and which offers great ways to organize information. Especially useful when travelling or to keep track of receipts- send or scan information to Evernote, tag it or do a key word search and watch the character recognition at work.

To be continued – in the meantime, have fun experimenting and do let me know how you get on.

Enjoyed this? Read more by Francesca Geens on using tech tools in your home office.